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Wednesday 16 November 2011

Alice to Adelaide: Heading South


Tour Day 3:

The third day of our tour started with a long lie, the sun was actually up before I stepped outside the tent! The rain had stopped sometime during the night leaving large puddles behind which I side stepped on my way to breakfast, grateful I didn’t need my umbrella to get there. Once everyone was up and about and had eaten we cleared away the breakfast things, loaded up the trailer and were soon on the bus again off to out next adventure. Our destination this time was a mining town called Cooper Pedy via another important aboriginal site known to us as the breakaways. Australia is ancient. The hills and mountains have been eroded to their present size and the long gone seas have left deposits which have solidified and been eroded by weather and tectonic movement giving the seemingly endless landscape stunning features such as Uluru, Kings Canyon, Kata Tjutu and now this vast area broken up by once again similar yet different features. Unlike the previous sites we didn’t venture down in to them but admired them from above (taking the obligatory million photographs of course) until it was time to get back on the bus and finish the drive to Cooper Pedy. On the way there  we were split in to two groups and informed that we would be set challenges along the way to Adelaide and the team with the most points at the end would get a prize. Sadly as the last to get on the bus my friend and I were separated by a German couple and we ended up on separate teams. Though this worked out quite well for me as at least all of my team spoke fluent English!


After unloading the trailer our first stop was at tour of the one of the many mines in the small town. We started with a film explaining the history of the town and how it came to its current incarnation. The main feature and attraction of the town after the opals is that it is mostly underground. After the second world war the men who returned head to Cooper Pedy to make their fortune. As there were no trees for miles around the ex-soldiers, used to building trenches, simply dug in to the hillsides and made their homes there. These days the residents use machinery but living underground is still the predominant way of life there.  After the film we were shown how opals are cut and polished from their rough state in to the stone we see in the stores. Next we were taken underground to see a basic hand mined room that showed how the original settlers lived before being shown a modern setup which looked a lot like a any other home except for the lack of windows. We walked from the house through some tunnels where we were given a short talk on current mining methods and shown a seam of opal in the rock. A quick look round the shop and cultural centre and it was back to our accommodations for lunch. Like much of the town out hostel was built in to one of the hills making it a very different hostel than any I had staying in before.

 




Post lunch we were given a quick tour of the town including an underground church and the coolest grave ever before stopping at a lookout point and getting a good overview of the town. Tour over some of us stopped by the public noodling area to look through the waste rock for small opals. I was a bit sceptical but it was surprisingly addictive and we found many pretty rocks but no big opals, though our guide did find a small one worth cutting and polishing. Noodling is dirty work so I was glad we had time for a shower before our pizza dinner, especially as we wouldn;t have to do any prep, cooking or clearing up ourselves for once. Usually dinner signals the end of the days activities but not this time. After dinner we were taken to Josephine’s Gallery where we saw some pretty good aboriginal art work and didgeridoos. Josephine’s isn’t just a gallery though it is also a Kangaroo orphanage. They take in orphaned Joeys and bring them back to health before releasing them to the wild or into one of the many sanctuaries in the country. We were fortunate enough to meet some of the orphans who for whatever reason wouldn’t survive in the wild and a couple of new arrivals that they hoped to release once they were well enough to survive on their own.  As if all this wasn’t enough we then had the added bonus of being taken out to a shooting range and I had my first attempt at using a shot gun. I am pleased to say I hit two of the clay pigeons though I am sure it was blind luck not skill both times and am even more please to say that our highest scorer was a fellow scot! 








                                                                
Tour Day 4:

Day four was a day of driving. We were up with the sun and left Cooper Pedy shortly after 8am to head south once more. We did stop at the flying doctor run way and attempted to land our own paper planes across it but the wind had other ideas. The direction of the wind meant that most of them went sideways rather than across the road! My team had the ingenious idea of scrunching up one of the planes and throwing it though so we won the challenge for which team got a plane furthest across the road. We passed through Glendambo which had the most interesting population sign I have seen yet and stopped at Lake Hart; one of the smaller dry salt pans it seemed to stretch for miles in to the distance. We stopped for lunch at Woomera where I earned some bonus points for my team by drinking a small sup of salad dressing before checking out the nearby birds. After lunch we stopped to look at some old rockets and planes as the town has it’s own rocket range. Woomera is a strange town. It has a tiny population yet it has a baseball field and oval that are kept in excellent repair and though many building look deserted there is evidence that people still live and work their though we only saw a handful of people whilst we were passing through, It’s easy to see why it could be the object of more than one conspiracy theory! After lunch we had a quick look at the rockets and planes on display nearby then it was back to the bus and on to our home for the next two nights, an old converted Mill in a place called Quorn. Once there we were given a break from meal duties as a tour going North were also going to be there for the same two nights so they took cooked and cleaned giving us a much appreciated break. After a day in the bus it was nice to spend the evening relaxing outside with a cold cider before getting an early night as we had a busy day ahead of us the next day. We had agreed to fit the last two day tour in to one so that we could stop at some wineries on the way in to Adelaide!






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